Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Imagine if you will, The Adolf Hitler Elementary School, if that was possible...Then imagine it being populated by 45 percent Jewish students.....Could you imagine that ever?
No...It would never ,I mean never.. ever happen....The Jewish people would not allow it...They would picket and protest and boycott until something was done about it....
But the thing is...It just would never happen....

So let's go to that strange ,strange state of my family's origin....Florida....Home of George Zimmerman...Where Marissa Alexander is unjustly incarcerated for firing a shot up in the air that hits no one....and George Zimmerman fires a shot into an unarmed teenaged boy and goes free...Let's go there....

And we find...A High School that is 45 percent African-American, named after a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.....

Only in the U.S.A. and only in Florida...Which is starting to outdo Mississippi as the most racist state in the union.

A Florida high school that for 54 years has borne the name of a leader of the Ku Klux Klan is to be renamed, officials said.

The Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Fla., where more than half the students are black, will change its name from that of the man who allegedly was the Ku Klux Klan's first grand wizard.

A new name will be proposed next month.

"We recognize that we cannot and are not seeking to erase history," said Constance Hall, a board member for the Duval County school, which was founded 54 years ago."For too long and too many, this name has represented the opposite of unity, respect, and equality," Hall said in a statement.

It turns out ole Nathan B. Forrest was an innovative cavalry leader and a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He joined the Ku Klux Klan after the war; there remains a dispute over his role.

With its roots in the Civil War era, the Ku Klux Klan has long been associated with hooded, white-robed night riders who menaced blacks with cross burnings, lynchings and other acts of violence. It's a terrorist group in plain language.Who can argue with that?

The honoring of Confederate heroes and emblems has been a divisive issue in the United States, with proponents saying it pays homage to regional history and opponents saying it amounts to racism.

Memphis, Tenn., in February this year dropped Confederate names from three city parks. One was named after Forrest.

Omotayo Richmond, who moved to Jacksonville from New York, wrote in a Change.org petition that garnered more than 160,000 signatures in support of changing the school's name that doing so would go toward healing "so much racial division in Florida.""African American Jacksonville students shouldn't have to attend a high school named for someone who slaughtered and terrorized their ancestors one more school year," Richmond wrote.

The 1,300-student public school, which became racially integrated in 1971, had voted some five years ago to keep the name, but those officials had been replaced, the petition said. Thank God..

Like I said...If you can first picture an Adolf Hitler Elementary School anywhere on the face of the earth...Picture it being populated by any percentage of Jewish children.... Would never happen.....This shouldn't have ever happened either....Ku Klux Klansmen are not American or Confederate heroes...They are vile murderers and terrorists and they represent something all Americans should be ashamed of...Not idolize.

1 comment:

Rich in the STL
said...

I didn't even read your entire post, because I grew up in Jacksonville. I remember Forest High School, but I can say they kept that KKK stuff on the low, because I never heard that growing up. However, Jacksonville was very racially polarized growing up, and is still so to this day. Just in the last couple of years they voted in the first black mayor in the city that is predominantly black but ran by majority whites. But back to the school thing. Jacksonville's very foundation is steeped in racism and civil war era heroes. I went to Kirby Smith (Confederate Civil War Officer) Jr. High (mascot the Rebels) and Andrew Jackson (President, Slave Owner, and if I'm not mistaken tied to the Civil War as well) Sr. High, so I'm not surprised that Forest was named after some guy in the KKK.

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